


Not So Much Awry

by thisbluespirit



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Gen, Haunted Houses, Obscure and British Commentfest, Original Character(s), original elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 19:20:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14837646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/pseuds/thisbluespirit
Summary: There are ghosts in the basement.





	Not So Much Awry

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt left by anon: "I want to see your original characters. Sapphire and Steel's universe is so open from interpretation, and I must confess that I have a particular fondness for all the wonderful fan-elements, gems, and metals that have sprung up in the fics I've read. Go utterly wild with this, if you please - your character on an adventure/interacting with the regular cast, or even with other original characters!! I can't wait to see what you come up with."

The house is empty. It’s looking sorry for itself; narrow and gloomy, with dust collecting in its corners and cobwebs in its attics. Outside, it’s a sharp contrast to the neatly kept houses on either side of it; one rotting tooth in an otherwise perfect Georgian terrace row.

There’s nothing much left inside it – only marks where signage has been taken down in the hall way and a box of office oddments that is all that remains of the last business that occupied its ground floor. In the floor above, a telephone sits in a bare-boarded room. It’s been cut off. There’s nothing else of note.

There’s very little left in it _to_ cause trouble, and yet it is.

“Well?” says Iron.

Emerald lowers her outstretched hand and shakes her head.

“How long has it been abandoned? Empty.”

That is a more defined, answerable query: “Six months, three weeks and five days. A small scale employment agency occupied two of these rooms. Upstairs was a flat – that has been empty for three years and ten days. Downstairs, a small printer’s. No. Designs. Business card designs, I think. They left eighteen months and twelve and a half days ago. They left nothing behind. Nothing that should have disturbed anything here.”

Iron shifts impatiently. “Well, there must be something. We’ve already heard the echoes. We have to search it again – find what we’re missing.”

 

They search the house once more, from attic to basement: Emerald starting at the top, Iron at the bottom and meeting in the middle, on the stairs.

“The attic,” she says. “I felt the disturbance far more strongly there.”

He gives a brief smile; a quirk of his mouth, a glimmer in his eyes, and no more. “The basement. It… feels wrong.”

“In what way?”

Iron stares back at her. “The dust of the years. The people. Longer ago than any of these businesses. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something that’s needed taking care of for a while.”

“You think that’s why none of the new people stayed?”

He nods. “But it is only a feeling.” He gestures to her to pass, and she sets off down to the basement while he proceeds on up to the attics.

 

Downstairs, in the basement, lit only by the light from the grimy window, shadowed by the railing outside, Emerald finds an intruder. He’s under the sink, fiddling with the plumbing. 

She grins suddenly, misleading dimples showing, and she waits for him to notice her.

 _Oh, I know you’re there_ , he says and slides back out to beam up at her. Mercury. They’ve sent them a technician. Things must be worse than they’d first thought. 

He picks himself up and dusts his suit down and heaves a sigh. “Did you hear the echoes in the pipes?”

“The water pipes?” says Emerald. She can almost see it now. “And the wiring?”

He nods eagerly. “Yes. And there’s an antiquated bell system – not even electrical. And talking of electrical, I’m surprised they let them get away with the state of this place. It’s not like that upstairs. Look at that light switch.”

It’s brass, darkened by time: an old fashioned tiny knob to press down, not a safe, modern switch.

Emerald closes her eyes, and remembers. “It’s like that in the attic, too.”

 

There are ghosts in the basement. Or echoes if you prefer, but it amounts to the same thing. Echoes and remnants of the people who spent their lives in the dark corners at the bottom and the top of the house. Here, tears fallen unseen into the sink with the washing up suds. Laundry day. Stitching by lamplight into the night to get the mending done. No time for themselves. And the bells ringing. Always the bells ringing.

“Yes,” says Mercury, leaping across to the bells. “It’s here. It’s them. That’s the focus. They’re disconnected now, but the system stretched across the house. It never gave them any peace.” 

He climbs onto the worktop and stretches a hand out towards them. “I can feel it from here.”

One of the bells rings.

Mercury looks at Emerald. “Oh, seems his lordship wants something.”

Emerald bites back a laugh. _Iron? Come down here – we’ve found the focal point._

 _We?_ he says, and she can feel his instinctive wariness even at this distance.

 _Come down and see_ , she says. _There are ghosts in the basement._

 

Iron stands at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement room. “Where are they, these ghosts?”

They can’t see them, only feel them, sometimes hear them: a bell rings, the sound of footsteps crossing the room, a clink of china, a waft of cold, and the feel of despair. No wonder the other humans didn’t want to stay. It’s more pervasive this way than if it was an obvious haunting.

She can, if she closes her eyes, almost see them: so many over the years, working all hours, sleeping in this cellar and in the bare attics above. Isolated, away from home. Lost in the dark.

“Find them,” says Iron, sitting down on the top step and watching her. “I can feel them here again. I can’t see them, but you could. 

She looks up at him, and he leans his head against the painted iron banisters. What he’s suggesting is dangerous, of course, but the only way to see all of the pieces of this puzzle. Emerald breaks more easily than some others of her kind. Sometimes that’s an advantage, but there’s always the worry that not all of her will make it back, or that something else will get inside her in the process. And it hurts.

“Wait, wait,” says Mercury, brushing dark hair out of his face, equally dark eyes sharp and bright with his idea. “See this bell – the largest? When you want to come back, keep your focus on it and I’ll lead you.”

Emerald nods, but she casts one last look at Iron. “What do you feel now?”

“Anger,” he says. “And time rides in on the back of that.”

Yes, she thinks: the people aren’t still here, they’re dead, or maybe some of them are still alive, but elsewhere. Nothing real is left here to help. The anger will only free something else. 

Emerald faces the bells and closes her eyes.

She shatters into a hundred and more pieces, scattered across the hiding places of time. She manages, this time, not to cry out at the glass-edged pain within.

“This is house is ours now,” says a maid in black with a discoloured white apron over the top and wearing her much detested mob cap – the badge of servitude. “Ours. We paid for it in sweat and blood.”

Emerald ignores the maid: she’s not here. She’s not real. And, interestingly, Emerald sees that she is not dead – she is working still in this city, much older, with this past left far behind her now. What remains in the house is the dust and the anger, injustice and terrible loneliness that live in the walls. What remains is Time, as ever.

“No time,” the maid says, “no time. Washing day. They that wash on Monday have all the week to dry. Dinner time. Pat a cake, pat a cake. Clear it all up. Over again, over again.”

“Then let it end,” says Emerald. “Let it _end_.”

The maid only continues, fading into a voice. Emerald is elsewhere, in another fragment of herself, but the complaints and the refrain is the same, over and over.

She thinks about Mercury and the bell – she thinks about Iron –

The ghosts cloud her mind: they think of iron ranges, smoothing irons, iron pokers, iron railings like prison bars. Emerald has to stop and think of the bell, think of pulling all the pieces of herself back into one, back into the present –

 

Iron is still sitting at the top of the stairs. She thinks he looks pale, and she narrows her gaze, even as she re-forms and takes a deep breath, glad to rehabit her usual shape. Something in here is affecting him more strongly.

“Iron?”

“They’re very angry,” he says with quiet amusement. “There are more of them now – stronger. How do we get rid of them?”

Emerald pulls herself back together again. “It needs to end – all the work. A final end.”

All three of them look to the bells.

“That simple?” says Mercury.

Iron shrugs. “Try it and see.”

Mercury detaches the nearest bell and cuts the wire behind it.

“Really,” says Iron, “I’d have thought they would have sent Copper for something like this.”

Mercury pulls out the next. “Aha, yes, but he had to go and extricate Silver.” Mercury gives Iron a grin. “Again. Something to do with being stuck inside a grandfather clock this time. Or was it the other way around? You know what both of them are like. Anyway, since I _am_ here, you might as well let me deal with it, even if it is beneath me.”

“Stop talking about it and just do it.”

Mercury winks, and cuts another wire. “I’m capable of doing both. It helps. Distracts things. My, my, my, this _is_ so very antiquated.”

He moves to cut the last wire – and falls.

“I don’t think it likes me.”

 _Emerald._ Iron’s voice in her head is urgent in response to the attack on Mercury. If something wants to stop the technician, they need to stop _it_.

She closes her eyes and lets one small, sharp fragment of herself adrift again. It stings a little, but she finds the maid and holds onto her. Somewhere, in time or out of it, she knows that Iron is watching Mercury climb back up and detach the last bell.

_Now._

She opens her eyes again, and knows the echoes have gone, taken down with the last bell.

Iron reaches her side, as Mercury hops back down from the worktop.

“You are complete again?”

She nods. “Is it done?” she asks Mercury.

“Oh, yes.” He pockets the last bell. “Better not leave that lying around.”

Emerald puts a hand to Iron’s arm. “And you?”

“I was only a little weighted down for a while,” he says. “Now, let’s go over the house to be sure – then we can leave it in peace.”

Peace here, Emerald thinks, is much needed and long overdue. “Yes, let’s,” she says, and laughs.


End file.
